They Cuss in E.T.? WTF!

My 6 year old daughter’s head perked up off of the bed. She stared at the laptop computer. E.T. had just done that cool stretchy thing with his neck. It was the scene when Elliot realizes with delight that he is taller than his new found alien pal, and then E.T. seems to defy the basic laws of biological physics by extending that huge head on top of that flimsy neck a good six inches above his frog-like alien shoulders.

“He can do that,” I told my daughter. “He can stretch his head…”

She stared at me.

“He’s an alien,” I tried again. “He can do stuff.”

“I know that, Daddy,” she replied. “I’ve seen aliens in other movies.” She paused. “I mean, what did the little boy say?”

I hadn’t really noticed so I went back a bit on the DVD. Turns out he dropped the “s bomb.”

He said sh#t.

“Ummm, he said a bad word.” I mumbled.

“But he’s a kid!” my daughter exclaimed.

I felt a need to defend Elliot’s response. If I had an alien pal, I’d swear like a sailor.

“Yeah, he’s a kid, but he just saw ET do something cool.”

This was a lame answer. I knew it was lame right when I said it.

But then my daughter helped me to understand why it was lame.

“They don’t talk like that in kid movies today, do they?” she asked.

And I got to thinking.

She’s right. They don’t.

Something strange, and insidious and emblematic of shifting values has happened in our entertainment world with regard to what we’re comfortable, as a culture, with letting our kids see and hear.

When I was a kid, I watched E.T. I also saw Logan’s Run (the first movie I saw with nudity). And I watched shows like Love American Style and Fantasy Island. These were not on the whole great examples of entertainment (well, I’ll maintain that E.T. and Logan’s Run are pretty great) but they were rated for or considered appropriate for the eyes and ears of children.

E.T. and Logan’s Run were both rated PG. Parental Guidance. And both had appropriate use of obscenities (that’s an opinion, I know) and Logan’s Run had references to sexuality. Love American Style certainly had sex all over the content. And Fantasy Island felt like a big advertisement for songs like Afternoon Delight. Hell, the little kid in A Christmas Story drops the ‘f-bomb” with genuine finesse.

So what happened?

It seems we flipped on what we’re cool with our kids seeing. Now, things can get PG or PG-13 ratings with all sorts of violence and guts and bleeding and gore, but, notably, they don’t cuss. And they don’t show skin.

I will submit to you that this is messed up.

Swearing and feeling physically passionate are normal. Blowing people away with shotguns is not. How did it happen that we decided that we’re more comfortable with our kids seeing people killed and maimed than we are with having our kids hear the occasional and well placed obscenitie or seeing love and tempered sex?

I know this is controversial and oversimplified, and also I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike violent movies. I’m a big fan of violent movies when they’re done well. Watch Eastern Promises, or A Touch of Evil and you’ll see what I mean.

But, WTF? My daughter takes more note of a boy saying sh#t then she does of E.T.’s marvelous neck? She thinks it odd that a kid would drop an obscenity or two at making contact with alien life?

She’s more wowed by his words than by his alien.

Again, this is messed up.

So, besides the fact that we now have a culture that allows kids to see killing as long as those who kill don’t cuss, and we let kids see violence as long as there are no sexual scenes, there’s a more pernicious bottom line.

Kids can’t swear these days. They use too many obscenities at once. And they use them too often. Lot of good the change in movies has done us, huh?

Hey Steve, it's Brian (now in Cincinnati).
It must have been a conscious choice to use those words in E.T. I remember that when this movie came out, I was 6 and my brother was 9. He came home after having been taken to the movie by a friend's parents and at the dinner table promptly practiced an insult he heard in the movie by calling me "penis breath." I forget now who calls whom that in E.T. My parents were shocked and insisted -- absolutely *insisted* -- that he must have heard it wrong, surely it was "peanut breath", a reference to the Reeses Pieces which played such a prominent role in the movie (the ads that ran on TV for the candy being ubiquitous).
Of course, as this was not the word used in our house for male genitalia, as a 6 year old I had never heard the word "penis" and no idea what the fuss was about. I definitely got the message that this was a super-intereting word, though.
I think the coolest part about this is that you were watching the movie *with* your daughter, thereby facilitating having a conversation to process what she had heard. I have parents asking me all the time if they should let their kids read or watch things, and it always seems like a revelation to them when I say "you should read it first, then you'll know for sure what you think" or recommend reading it together so that they can talk about e.g. the deaths in Hunger Games. I think both the organic use of vulgar language and violence have a role as part of the story (as in ET or Hunger Games); it's when casual use numbs us to the emotional impact of these things that the artistic value has been lost.

“Now, things can get PG or PG-13 ratings with all sorts of violence and guts and bleeding and gore, but, notably, they don’t cuss. And they don’t show skin.”

“How did it happen that we decided that we’re more comfortable with our kids seeing people killed and maimed than we are with having our kids hear the occasional and well placed obscenitie or seeing love and tempered sex?”

Ratings boards giving movies a PG or PG-13 rating, is a kind of window dressing. Just because a movie isn't rated PG or PG-13 doesn't mean that young children aren't watching it. So don't get upset about ratings, they really have very little effect at all on what kids actually watch.

But I agree with you that swearing and sex are minor issues compared to violence. And unfortunately children's TV is teeming with violence:

“The results were staggering. In the 443.5 hours of children's programming analyzed by the PTC there were 3488 instances of violence -- an average of 7.86 violent incidents per hour. Even when the innocent, "cartoony" violence most of us grew-up with (e.g. an anvil falling on Wile E. Coyote's head) is extracted, there were still 2794 instances of violence for an average of 6.30 violent incidents per hour. To put this figure in perspective, consider that in 2002 the six broadcast networks combined averaged only 4.71 instances of violence per hour of prime time programming.* Thus there is more violence aimed directly at young children than at adults on television today.”

It used to be that if a parent wanted the services of a the electronic babysitter, they were stuck with their child being the target of endless marketing (TV commercials) and being exposed to as much violence as the networks chose to broadcast. But now, parents really do have a choice. With DVDs, Netflicks, Amazon (instant video) and other services, parents can still use the electronic babysitter but protect their kids from TV commercials (kids are especially targeted with junk food commercials) and violent TV.

With the well-documented negative effects of commercials and violence on TV, I hope parents will use these tools to protect their kids from exploitive media companies.